This week’s featured collector is Creativebloch
Creativebloch is a Brooklyn-based artist who channels the raw energy of New York City into layered acrylic paintings that capture grit, history, and humanity. Check it out at lazy.com/creativebloch
Last week’s poll landed in a dead heat: 43% of you said NFT art is “in transition,” and 43% said it’s “mostly over.” Only 14% think we’re still early. The interesting part is that even the split isn’t really about whether NFT art exists—it’s about whether the post-2021 reset is a messy middle chapter or the closing credits. Same facts, two readings: one group sees a medium rebuilding its norms (distribution, curation, royalties, institutions), the other sees the hype-era proving the ceiling. Either way, optimism is no longer default—and that’s probably a sign the space is maturing.
From NFT collector to builder of onchain cultural infrastructure
If you’ve been around NFTs since the first wave, you already know the name Vignesh Sundaresan—better known as Metakovan, the collector behind Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days. That purchase wasn’t just a trophy moment; it was one of the clearest signals that NFTs had opened a new lane for digital art: global distribution, digital-native ownership, and a cultural market that didn’t need permission from the usual gatekeepers.
Now Sundaresan is pushing the story forward in a way that should interest anyone who cares about NFTs as more than collectibles: he’s building infrastructure.
In Singapore, he’s founded Padimai Art & Tech Studio, a space where commissioning, exhibition, and technical research converge—and where blockchain is used for something most NFT platforms talk about but rarely deliver: durable cultural memory. “Padimai is a Tamil word that means thought or philosophy — the solidifying of an idea into something,” he says. In NFT terms, it reads like a shift from buying a piece to building the rails that keep digital art alive.
Padimai opens with a commission that’s basically a thesis statement: Olafur Eliasson’s Your view matter, a VR work made up of six virtual environments based on the five Platonic solids plus a sphere. The forms are perfectly symmetrical, but the experience isn’t. In VR, the space “locks in” only through your movement—how you turn, how fast you go, where you look. Eliasson describes VR as simply another studio tool now, but one that heightens awareness of mobility: you’re not escaping into a world so much as noticing how your body navigates it.
Here’s where it gets very NFT-relevant: Padimai records each visitor’s trajectory through the work.
Every session becomes its own file in a growing archive—a plural record of perception that treats the artwork as something that renders differently for each person. If NFTs introduced the idea of a public ledger for provenance, Padimai extends that logic to experience: not just “who owns what,” but “how was it encountered, and how did it unfold in time?”
Sundaresan’s way of getting there is also notable. Instead of using blockchain as a financial rail, he stripped it down. “I took blockchain software, stripped out the monetary parts, and used it as an archiving machine — a time-logging machine,” he explains. Think of it as onchain provenance for the viewing experience, built for longevity rather than liquidity. The artist can decide how (or whether) to incorporate that data into the work, but the archive remains—timestamped, persistent, and designed to outlast any single platform.
That’s a subtle but meaningful evolution of the NFT idea. The first era was about minting and marketplaces. Padimai is about cultural infrastructure: how you preserve works that depend on code, devices, and evolving formats—especially VR, where the “object” is inseparable from hardware, software, and interaction. Sundaresan describes his role as working at the boundary of the artwork: the artist makes the art, and he focuses on the technical housing—storage, access, durability, and what happens as technology ages.
Eliasson describes the collaboration as built on trust. “Honesty comes with a risk,” he says, and that risk creates the conditions for trust—an important reminder that the best NFT-adjacent projects aren’t just technical innovations, they’re relationship-driven. Even without fully understanding every technical layer, Eliasson recognized the intent.
Padimai’s setting reinforces the point. It’s located in Tanjong Pagar Distripark, an industrial zone that’s become a cultural hub—where storage, logistics, and exhibition live side by side. That’s basically the physical-world version of what digital art needs: not just display, but preservation systems that don’t collapse when platforms change.
And Singapore is a fitting place to test this model. It’s a society built on connectivity—smartphones and digital services mediate daily life, and digital literacy is widespread. People still ask, “What do I do with digital art?” Sundaresan says, but they’re excited to try. That matters, because digital art infrastructure only becomes “real” when it’s used by the public, not just talked about by insiders.
Sundaresan also addresses the sustainability question in a way that will sound familiar to anyone who has had the energy debate for the 100th time. Early blockchains were energy intensive, yes—but protocols evolved. The question now is about efficiency and whether the energy use is warranted. In Padimai’s case, the goal is lightweight persistence: he points out that blockchains can now be so lean that “two servers are enough.”
That last idea might be the most forward-looking NFT angle here. Instead of betting everything on a few giant platforms (marketplaces, social networks, private clouds), Padimai imagines many small, resilient cultural institutions running in parallel—independent nodes that preserve digital experiences outside private infrastructure. That’s web3’s decentralization thesis, applied not to finance, but to culture.
For NFT collectors, the takeaway is simple: the first wave proved digital art could be minted, owned, and traded. The next wave is about whether it can be commissioned, experienced, and preserved with the same confidence—without relying on a single company’s servers or a single platform’s incentives.
Padimai is one concrete attempt to answer that. It treats the viewer not as an afterthought, but as part of the work’s record—and it uses blockchain not for speculation, but for what it’s best at when you remove the casino: timestamped, durable, shared history.
If NFTs are going to mature into a true cultural medium, projects like this—where collectors become infrastructure builders—may end up being as important as any headline sale.
Read the full interview at Lampoon magazine.
Poll: Which future for NFT art feels most plausible?
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